In turn serious and gentle, pleasant and severe, he moves us, inviting us into the various scenes he presents to us and sympathizing with the emotions he provokes in us. Possessing, in his religious painting, the faith that inspires genius and the talent that executes it, Poussin deserves one of the highest places amongst painters of the French school. With a generous and obliging character, a gentle and religious philosophy, less interested in honours than in his own tranquillity, leading a secluded, peaceful and extremely hard-working life; a zealous friend, to whom nothing was too much; of a modesty equal to his moderation, a serious mind, spiritual, noble, honest and affable, with an upright and healthy spirit, Nicolas Poussin possessed the genius of an immortal artist and all the virtues of an honest man.
Extract from the French Wikipedia entry on Nicolas Poussin, available at fr.wikipedia.org
When the dealers, curators and art historians of the twenty-first century turn their attention to the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, they are supported (without necessarily realizing it) by the result of more than three centuries of history. Indeed, from the fame the painter acquired during his lifetime to the hagiographical works devoted to him today, the name of Nicolas Poussin encapsulates three centuries of positive acclaim. The process of the collective sanctification of artists and of the consecration of some of them lies behind the particular magic which is evoked when the name of a famous artist is associated with a canvas. This historically and collectively generated magic, which transfers from the name of the master to the object he is said to have painted, is contagious and affects all those who succeed in associating themselves with it.
Rather than an exhaustive analysis of the conditions and the processes which led to the painter’s renown, we will set out here simply to reveal some of the elements which have seen him acquire this European and even worldwide glory. An exhaustive view would be difficult to achieve, given that this would mean not only defining Poussin’s initial position within the world of painting in his time, but also understanding how, generation after generation, his work has been analysed, criticized or praised to the heavens by artists (painters, sculptors or writers) or by authorized commentators (critics, historians, essayists, philosophers, etc.).
Poussin’s renown has sometimes fluctuated in the course of history but has never sunk into periods of total oblivion. This is not the case for all painters and the cycle of being ‘lost again’ and then being ‘recovered from oblivion’ described by Haskell was particularly common in the course of the nineteenth century.1 Some, like Vermeer or Piero della Francesca, were confined to purgatory for long periods before finding a fame which now seems incontestable and as though set in stone. Others had significant success in their time but their recognition proved to be no more than short-lived.2 Unlike Vermeer, the Le Nain brothers, Piero della Francesca, Georges de La Tour and many others besides, Poussin never ceased to be more or less acclaimed, though that does not of course mean that this acclaim was never contested or that it did not vary in intensity.
How did Poussin become the ‘master of French classicism’? How did the painters of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries come to sing his praises, to regard him as a reference or to identify with his painting or his attitudes? Why did writers feature him in their texts and commentaries? Why did historians integrate him into the great history of painting, granting him pride of place? Even if it is impossible to reply fully to such questions, we must at least endeavour to do so if we are to show that for the actors we are going to study, the Poussin they were to come into contact with is the product of a long history. The mere mention of his name today, just like the attribution of certain paintings to this artist, carry the weight of this long many-layered past in the form of texts (scholarly articles, catalogues raisonnés, biographies, encyclopaedias of art history, mass publications, newspaper or magazine articles, etc.), of institutions (École des Beaux-arts, museums, galleries, exhibitions, art markets, etc.) and of the mental pictures conjured up by actors from the art world (artists, art dealers, curators, art historians, cultural journalists, collectors, art lovers, etc.).
A look back over Poussin’s career and at his behaviour as a painter, at his conception of painting and at some of the main features of his work allows us to see his role in the major transformations of his time and, by the same token, to see how the biographical reality ties in with the great structural transformations:
Looking at the past is also an opportunity to discover some denigrators of his work as well as all of those who, far from considering him a major painter, were inclined to play down his importance. Who could imagine today that Eugène Delacroix could have preferred the baroque painter, Eustache Le Sueur (1616–1655) to Nicolas Poussin?3 ‘Poussin loses a great deal by being shown near Le Sueur. He has no feeling for the muse of Grace, and harmony in line, colour and effect is another quality, or rather a whole collection of most valuable qualities, in which he is entirely lacking.’4 The ‘artist of genius’, ‘immortal’, the ‘painters’ painter’ or the ‘master of French classicism’ are the products of history which have imposed themselves over time. Taking up such expressions today without re-inserting them into history, is to adopt, unknowingly, the vision of the victors, the one which appears in the textbooks and encyclopaedias, smoothing out all the rough edges of a history where opposing judgements intersected.5
Born in 1594 in Les Andelys (a small town in Normandy), Poussin’s father came from a family of lawyers and had served in the army of Henry IV of France, and his mother was an alderman’s daughter. He received an excellent education from the Jesuits and studied Latin. At a time when a career as an artist was generally not very prestigious and where painters were apprenticed from a very young age, ‘Poussin or the Le Nain family who were borderline gentry or in royal employ, were the exception’.6 In 1612, he left the family home to take up a career as a painter and moved to Paris where he already had some commissions. During the early years of his career, between 1612 and 1624, he travelled in France and Italy. In 1622, the archbishop of Paris, Jean-François de Gondi, commissioned a Death of the Virgin for the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.
Around 1624, at a time when he could have begun to acquire recognition in Paris and when other artists were choosing not to go to Rome or Florence, he settled in Italy, first in Venice and then in Rome:
It is possible that this rather unusual reaction which would manifest itself on several occasions subsequently was displayed here, that desire to run away each time fortune smiled on him and seemed to offer him too brilliant a destiny. The Paris Poussin so abruptly broke away from would have been all the readier to raise him to the very top rank given that Fréminet, Bunel, Pourbus had disappeared, Vignon and Vouet had not returned from Rome and foreigners like Rubens and Gentileschi found themselves in demand. Many artists – his friend Champaigne first among them – sensed the time was right and were renouncing any plans to travel across the Alps since these no longer exerted the same fascination for younger painters as they had ten years previously.7
In making this choice, which went somewhat against the tide, but which suggested a self-confidence due to a more noble lineage than other painters of his time and a better education, Poussin was prioritizing the development of pictorial skills and, at that time, the need he felt to live out the Roman experience, rather than cultivate immediate social recognition.
Thus, in 1624, he began life in Rome. After several difficult years, with little support, he obtained the protection of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, nephew of Pope Urban VIII, and of his secretary Cassiono Del Pozzo. He received, in particular, a commission for an altarpiece for the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome and as a result he succeeded in gaining recognition:
Particularly productive years: we get a sense of tireless research and the attempt to draw attention to himself by astonishing paintings: the Massacre of the Innocents for Giustiniani, The Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the Death of Germanicus for the Barberini. The combined forces of modern erudition argue over how to order in a plausible way the abundant series of paintings which we are left with, contradictory in style and in inspiration and nonetheless in stark contrast with the other French painters in Rome – Vouet, Valentin, Trophime Bigot, and with the works of artists like Lanfranc or Cortona. Such efforts were quickly rewarded. At the beginning of 1628, Poussin obtained the commission for The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus, a painting for Saint Peter’s in Rome, which was hung in the basilica towards the end of 1629. Visible in the most famous building in Rome, this masterpiece assured the renown of the young painter. In the space of five years, Poussin had regained, with considerable profit, what he had given up in Paris.8
From 1630, the year of his marriage, the social recognition acquired as a result of the altarpiece enabled him to work essentially on easel paintings for private patrons. Here, too, the choice not to follow the most accepted route for his time seemed to indicate a strong artistic disposition towards independence.9 More modest works, commissioned by amateur art collectors who had neither the power nor the visibility of the high places associated with religion or the State allowed him to create more freely than the larger scale works which, according to sound social logic, he ought to have been undertaking if he was aiming to become a great name in the painting of his time. Paying off in the longer term, at the time Poussin’s approach could give the impression of a total lack of realism or of a strategy that veered towards the suicidal: ‘At the same time’, wrote Thuillier,
he gives up angling for big commissions, church altarpieces or palace decors, instead devoting himself entirely to ‘cabinet paintings’ destined for amateurs. […] This arrangement demonstrates his decision to stay permanently in Rome, not to follow the example of artists such as Vignon and Vouet who had returned to Paris to exploit the experience and prestige acquired in Italy. Choosing to concentrate on works merely destined for the ‘curious’ means abandoning a great career, the favour of the European courts, everything which at the time represented the highest claim to fame for painters: the altarpiece, the dome, the gallery, those large-scale decorative pieces which had brought glory to Raphael, Michelangelo and Carracci, and which would later bring renown to the companions of his generation and ambition, Vouet in France and Cortona in Rome.10
With his reputation steadily growing, from 1638, Cardinal Richelieu and Sublet de Noyers (Secretary of State for War and Superintendent of Buildings) with the help of Paul Fréart de Chantelou, who had facilitated the arrival in France of ‘major works such as antiques, plaster mouldings, etc.’,11 embarked on negotiations with a view to getting him to return to Paris. The negotiations were on a similar level to those associated with the transfer of a professional footballer in the twenty-first century. Poussin stipulated, as far as was possible, his material, financial and artistic conditions. For the French State, bringing Poussin back to France at a time when he was extremely well recognized in Rome, was a way of reviving the prestigious artistic policy of François I, of rivalling Spain and of adding to the grandeur of France. The logic of international competition generated the need, therefore, to seek out the most promising artists wherever they were to be found. For a long period, not surprisingly, these were Italians. In this context, the snaring of Poussin enhanced both artistic and national interests. Even if he was now working in Italy, Poussin had been born in France and could be claimed as a ‘French painter’.
François I [1494–1547], who had created the role of First Painter to the King, had successfully supported the arts (more than a century later, his example was still constantly being used to convince Louis XIV to do likewise) but the civil wars and the indifference of his successors were to result in a difficult period for the ‘fine arts’. […] it was only with the arrival of Vouet, and particularly Poussin, that painters could be found with a status which lifted them above the ordinary. The situation was further aggravated by the absence of any real national tradition; the glorious painters who had worked for François I, from Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Sarto to Rosso, Primaticcio and Nicolo Dell’Abate, were all Italians.12
In 1639, the conditions were accepted by King Louis XIII, who sent an extremely flattering letter to the painter. By 1640, Poussin was therefore sent for by Richelieu and began work on major decorative projects (including the Long Gallery in the Louvre). In March 1641, he was named First Painter to the King, the highest position possible for a French painter:
Poussin received on 20 March 1641, on the occasion of his arrival in France, the title of ‘First Painter’. More faithful to the old order, Louis XIII, in his letter of 15 January 1639, had only promised Poussin that he would make him ‘one of our official painters’. The certificate of 1641 clearly demonstrates the essential prerogative of the position since Poussin would be in charge ‘of all the works of painting and ornamentation that he [His Majesty] would subsequently command for the decoration of his Royal Houses’. With three thousand pounds of wages which would be paid to him by the Buildings treasury, Poussin also received a right which seemed extraordinary: all painters creating a work for the king would have to submit their projects to him.13
The object of jealousy, he at once became the victim of a campaign of criticism and plots on the part of his rivals. He soon reached the conclusion that not only did the monumental projects he was charged with fail to correspond to the type of painting he wanted to do, but also that the sheer number of tasks he was given responsibility for would inevitably mean less time to devote to his paintings. On 20 September 1641, he wrote from Paris to Cassiano del Pozzo:
Without any pause whatsoever, I work sometimes on one thing and sometimes on another. I would happily bear these fatigues if it were not for the fact that works requiring a great deal of time have to be dashed off in a single session. I swear to your Lordship, that if I remained long in this country, I would become a bungler like all the others here. The study and close observation from antiquity or suchlike are completely unknown here, and anyone with an inclination to study or to do things well should certainly keep well away.14
Becoming a ‘bungler like all the others’ is exactly what Poussin sought to avoid. Once again, his artistic inclinations proved stronger than the desire for recognition or the thirst for power:
Suddenly, there he is raised up to the position of First Painter to the King of France. Vouet is relegated to the background (in principle at least), no French artist can any longer hope to compete with him, and even the greatest Italians could not look down on this painter who only yesterday had neither commissions nor honours. But Poussin finds himself face to face with new problems, or with problems he had set aside for many years. In spite of the commitments undertaken, he found himself required to produce not only paintings, but also ornate ceilings, designs for tapestries, the décor of the largest gallery in the world, architectural drawings, ideas for engravings, ornaments and even restorations. He was required to be, at the same time, a surveyor of the fine arts and the creator of a certain style, as well as to live the frenetic life of a courtier. He quickly realized that his painstaking and perfection-seeking genius was not suited to this role and that this brilliant existence (though flattering to his self-esteem) lacked what he most needed: the quiet contemplation necessary to his creation.15
During this Parisian period, he became acquainted with most of his future patrons and friends, individuals who were all the more interested in him in that he was recognized by the king. These included Paul Fréart de Chantelou, an influential aristocrat (buyer of ten or more paintings), Jean Pointel, a Parisian banker and silk manufacturer (more than twenty paintings), and Jacques Serisier, a silk merchant originally from Lyon but then living in Paris (a dozen paintings, including a Flight into Egypt in 1657–1658). As in Rome a few years earlier, the institutional legitimacy (that of an Italian cardinal and then of a French king) gave Poussin the opportunity to make contacts with sponsors in conditions that were very favourable to him. He was appreciated and recognized for his talent and nobody treated him like a simple craftsman from whom a canvas could be ordered. Poussin would therefore benefit from the effects of his royal prestige to build up a small network of faithful and admiring sponsors.16 And, even if he kept to reasonable prices with his sponsors, Poussin would also benefit from the rise in his reputation following the stay in Paris which would have led to large numbers of engravings of his works and the rapid increase in the price of his paintings.17
By 1642, the break with Louis XIII was complete. Poussin threw in the sponge and returned to Rome never to leave again. The painters and sculptors who founded the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1648 did not even make contact with him, given his strained relationship with French power: ‘His cavalier attitude towards the king and Richelieu on the occasion of his hasty return to Rome and his stubborn refusal to return to Paris somewhat compromised his patronage there.’18 The intrigues and criticisms of Simon Vouet (painter) and Jacques Lemercier (architect) and the nature of the work assigned to him had got the better of his patience. On 4 April 1642, in a letter to Cassiano del Pozzo, he complained of being ‘continually hampered by trifles such as drawings for the frontispieces of books, or designs for the décor of cabinets, fireplaces, book covers and other such inanities’. He said he ‘bemoaned the tasks he was given which he felt were a waste of [his] time’.19 Leaving behind the oppressive royal environment and the prestigious but artistically counterproductive status as the King’s painter, Poussin would go on to lead a life entirely devoted to the kind of painting he loved:
Apart from the brief Parisian interlude of 1640, Poussin would never again abandon this peaceful existence. No more travelling, no large-scale ventures requiring his presence on sites or at court. No rivalries or intrigues. A carefully ordered timetable, regular work without any of the capriciousness of commissions. Money quickly poured in. […] A simple and practical life, on the ancient model (which seemed deliberately chosen) of pater familias, allowed his creativity free reign.20
The painter would therefore all through his life, and particularly after 1630, rely on the development of ‘the art of collecting’, where nobles or bourgeois maintained relationships based more on friendship than on hierarchy or patronage with the painters they looked to in order to build up their collections.
Two almost identical comments six years apart confirm Poussin’s inclination to lead a quiet life. On 21 December 1643, Richelieu having died at the end of the previous year and Louis XIII on 14 May, Poussin wrote a letter from Rome to Chantelou: ‘But it is no small pleasure to occasionally emerge from the orchestra pit and, from some small, unseen corner, be able to watch the movements of the actors.’ And he reiterates virtually the same comment in a letter to the same Chantelou on 17 January 1649: ‘It is however a great pleasure to live in a century where such great things are taking place, provided one can hide in some small corner in order to watch the drama in comfort’. Being the person who looks on and who stands back from the theatre of power, preferring the peace of creating in his studio to the prestige of the title ‘First Painter’ to the king of France, with its attendant reduction in creative opportunities and constant demands and a life made up of permanent rivalries and jealousies – this is what guides Poussin. In 1675, when he was elected as president of the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome, the most important institution of that kind in Italy, he again turned his back on this honour.
It is undoubtedly Poussin’s early educational and social experience which gave him this strength to resist everything that the vast majority of painters of his time would have found attractive. An atypical painter ‘because of his class (his family belonged to the petite noblesse de robe), his education, his refusal to submit to the routine of the large studios’,21 his approach to painting is unusually demanding which is perhaps partly due to an intimately felt need to avoid being a painter like other painters.
It was in 1657 that he started painting The Flight into Egypt at the behest of Jacques Serisier. The flight into Egypt is an episode in the life of Jesus recounted in The Gospel of Saint Matthew in which the angel of the lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him to flee to Egypt with Mary and Jesus because King Herod, jealous of the birth of the new-born king, wanted to kill him. With his mastery of biblical, mythological or Roman scenes, Poussin was part of a long tradition going back to the fifth century. Lucette Valensi notes, moreover, that ‘these increased in number from the tenth century onwards (or a great number of them survived destruction and the wear and tear of time) and reached their highest degree of popularity between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The Flight into Egypt would still inspire leading artists in the following century (Watteau, Tiepolo father and son, Fragonard), but its influence inevitably ebbed’.22
Suffering since 1640 from a tremor in his hands, a distinctive element of his last period of painting, Poussin died in Rome on 19 November 1665. Chantelou, whom he had named as his executor, would defend his memory as he would that of Bernini (Italian sculptor and painter, 1598–1680).
Antoine Schnapper paints a detailed picture of the situation of painters in seventeenth-century France:
French painting in the seventeenth century came from three distinct worlds. In larger villages, but also in many towns where no guilds existed, crowds of painters busied themselves, some of them highly skilled but most simply craftsmen who would never emerge from obscurity. The latter produced innumerable modest paintings which, in spite of the upheaval and the destruction of the Revolution, still fill our village churches today. A second world was made up of larger towns where the profession of painter or sculptor, like most others, had since the middle ages been granted the status of a professional organization which would later be called a ‘corporation’. The cartography of this world, which did not include most of the towns in the South of France, was not yet clear, but Paris was the principal element and the model. In these various types of guild or corporations, the only people who had the freedom to undertake and sell their production were the masters, admitted after a long period of apprenticeship and experience, and having produced a ‘masterpiece’ often incurring quite substantial expenses in the process. Finally, at the highest level, the only one which was more or less widely recognized, was the Royal Academy of painting and sculpture, founded in 1648. This was created as an alternative to the system of the masters, accused of all the evils in the world and in particular of curbing the liberty of those who were not yet called ‘artists’, reducing them to a mercantile role.23
In relation to this hierarchy of positions, Poussin occupied a place which was both very high and relatively marginal for his time. He stood apart from the world of craftsmen yet distanced himself from institutionally and socially more advantageous positions. On two separate occasions (in Rome and then in Paris), he engaged in a period of prestigious institutional legitimacy immediately followed by a withdrawal and a retreat to his studio and the solid network of his sponsors. Poussin seemed24 first to seek legitimacy wherever it was to be found, before then returning to freer but less prestigious and less clearly delineated zones, reflecting the fact that the art market was still not very clearly organized. He needed this legitimacy from institutions in order to increase his fame and attract the attention of potential backers. But, once he had succeeded in winning that legitimacy, he was always quick to return to creative work of a more ‘personal’ kind. In Rome, once he had finished the altarpiece for the basilica of Saint Peter, he could have gone on to undertake other prestigious works, but instead chose to return to his easel paintings. In Paris, he could have extended his advantageous position of First Painter to the King for as long a period as possible, but preferred instead to break away from this privilege, which he saw as a poisoned chalice from a strictly pictorial point of view. Finally, in Rome, he could have accepted the honour associated with being president of the Academy of Saint Luke, but turned down this distinction, which would no doubt have taken him away from his studio. In summing up Poussin’s position and his outlook, it could be said that his attitude foreshadows that of the independent modern artist who sells his or her work on the market.
Artist he certainly is, in every aspect of his demeanour and approach. While other painters of the time were still battling to forcibly proclaim their association with the liberal arts and to distinguish themselves from the mechanical arts, Poussin, for his part, was someone who primarily painted noble subjects (mythological, biblical25 and Roman scenes), which required a certain level of erudition. Knowledge and erudition clearly distinguished those who simply wanted to make something with their hands from artists who, for their part, put their knowledge into carefully thought out and executed acts of creation. But Poussin above all paints in a particularly reflective way, setting himself even further apart from simple craftsmen. Indeed, Poussin is known for his habit of thinking about his pictures for a long time before actually painting them. His preparations often involved small wax figures which he arranged in a box in order to determine with great precision the poses, positions and the play of light and shadow which would be involved in the painting. Often referred to throughout history as the ‘painter-philosopher’, he is, however, less scholarly than reflective and meticulous in the way he prepares his compositions.
Marin has also emphasized the importance Poussin placed on the conditions in which his paintings would be seen. In a letter to André Félibien, on 26 February 1648, he considers the frame of the painting as one of the conditions of possibility for contemplating this latter. The frame is a material, non-linguistic means of suggesting that something is being represented and that this needs to be looked at with attention. For Poussin, Marin explains, the frame is ‘one of the operators of the constitution of the painting as a visible object whose entire purpose is to be seen’.26 The painter goes as far as to theorize about the difference between the ‘aspect’, which consists in simply seeing, and the ‘prospect’, which implies a careful consideration of things, the frame representing one of the ways of moving from the aspect to the prospect.
It is, however, undoubtedly in his way of defining the quality of paintings by the manner of painting rather than by the choice of subjects painted that he proves to be closest to the modern conception of art. ‘Flights into’ and ‘Rests on the way to’ Egypt are common enough in painting. Such themes, like others painted by Poussin, are even somewhat hackneyed. In his handwritten notes on painting, Poussin makes a distinction between himself and those who seek to renew painting simply by the choice of subject (original, surprising, strange). For him, any renewal must come first and foremost through the care and attention put into the work and the choice of the way it is painted: ‘The new in painting certainly does not consist in a previously unseen subject, but in good and original composition/arrangement/layout and expression, and thus from commonplace and old, the subject becomes remarkable and new.’27 Or again: ‘If the painter wants to awake a sense of wonder in the soul, even though the subject he has to hand is not of the sort to produce it, he does not need to introduce new and strange things, things without reason, but must force his mind to make his work marvellous by the excellence of its manner, of which it could be said: materiam superabat opus [the workmanship surpasses the subject].’28 Form and method above all, Poussin seems to be saying. A notion, which would seem commonplace several centuries later, was jarringly modern in its time.
Poussin’s fortunes across the centuries were not independent from the qualities which defined his initial place in the world of seventeenth-century painters. By accumulating signs both of institutional recognition and of his resistance to or distance from institutions and powers,29 not only did he stand out from the other painters of his time, but he could not fail to provoke the admiration of those who, several centuries later, would see in him, whether because of his concern for form, his perfectionism and introspection, or because of his desire to distance himself from worldly recognition and from money, or for his desire to paint as he chose, rather than under pressure, a most honourable precursor of the modern, independent artist. In his essay on Poussin (1853), Delacroix drew up the clear portrait of just such an artist: he
emphasized naturally Poussin’s historic range, his break with the false schools of mannerism, but what was most important to him was to present Poussin’s life as that of a modern artist. He described a struggling painter in a narrow-minded country, and extolled him as one of the most daring artists who had pursued his goals unflinchingly in a relentless battle against the enemies of art, the incomprehension of his country and misfortune. In doing so, Delacroix avoided any mention of Poussin’s later success with French and Italian collectors, in order to use him as the model for his own fight for recognition. It mattered little to him that, since Thiers had risen to political fame in 1833, the most important official commands had been allocated to him in Paris. What counted for him was the gulf between the innovative boldness of his work and the seven successive refusals of his application to the Académie des Beaux-Arts.30
Rosenberg emphasizes that
this freedom of the artist in the face of his patrons and sponsors, this refusal of any official life in favour of his art, this deliberate choice, the exact opposite of a Velasquez, a Rubens or a Bernini (or in France, soon, of a Le Brun), who knew how to create and serve their princes at the same time, would have to wait until the nineteenth century before being acknowledged as the indispensable conditions to any artistic creation.31
Aesthetically, Poussin is associated with classicism, which in Italy is linked in particular to Annibal Carracci and Guercino. These painters drew their references from Greco-Roman antiquity and favoured clear composition which was highly ordered in comparison with the disorderly profusion of Baroque painting. In France, it was under Louis XIII and Louis XIV that the classicism considered (by the French) as being suited to the ‘French spirit’ (art associated with reason, with the rigorous, the ordered, with clarity) developed. Poussin was, however, unanimously considered as the great master of this French classicism which included, amongst others, Simon Vouet, Charles Le Brun, Nicolas Claude Lorrain, Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis Le Nain, Georges de La Tour, Eustache Le Sueur, Pierre Mignard, Valentin de Boulogne and Philippe de Champaigne.
‘Even before we look at a Poussin canvas and indeed at the very mention of his name, we must question exactly why this name has been revered for two and a half centuries. I see very few examples, amongst other painters, of a glory which has resisted changes in tastes in the same way. Witness the opinion of Félibien, the most devoted Poussinist of the seventeenth century, on Rembrandt and Velasquez: “What do you find of excellence in the works of these unknowns?”.’32 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Paul Desjardins (1859–1940), professor of philosophy, senior lecturer at the Écoles Normales de Sèvres et Saint-Cloud, perfectly summarizes the path of the painter’s fame.33
Poussin was to figure amongst the few great names already considered as a benchmark by the end of the seventeenth century: ‘At some time during the last third of the seventeenth century the feeling developed that the age of very great painters was over – painters whose reputations would, like those of Raphael, Titian and Correggio, the Carracci, Poussin and Rubens, continue to grow and to solidify into eternity.’34 The fact that he was coveted both by certain Italian authorities and by Louis XIII, the fact too that he was one of the rare great painters of the seventeenth century whom the royal power could claim as a French painter, even though he had spent the greater part of his life in Rome, the fact also that he seemed to behave like an independent, modern artist, capable of disdaining honour and money in order to protect the conditions of his creation, the fact finally that he would contribute in a magnificent manner, through his scholarly approach to painting and his reflective attitude, to the clear demarcation between painting (part of the liberal arts) and the mechanical arts which was becoming institutionally recognized more or less throughout Europe. All of this, of course contributed first to the fame and then to the glory of the artist.
The nationalism of art lovers or of those who make the cultural policies of a country is a fundamental given which should never be underestimated. Haskell made it very clear, for example, how Watteau, at one time considered as a ‘barely French’ painter, became ‘the very embodiment of the French spirit’.35 As far as Poussin is concerned, France Trinque has established that without this nationalistic dimension, his fame might perhaps not have survived the ‘quarrel over colours’ and the changing tastes of the Academy from 1699.36 ‘He was in spirit a pure Frenchman of France’, comments Samuel Rocheblave in 1897.37 And Desjardins drives the nationalist point firmly home in 1903: ‘Fully Italianized, in costume, language and spirit, he remains French in terms of predilection and choice.’38 But, at the end of the twentieth century we find the same concern with nationality in an art historian as distinguished as Thuillier: ‘If Poussin, a Roman by adoption, nevertheless fully belongs to French painting, it is because after his brief – barely twenty-two months – stay in Paris he still retained faithful friends, ardent admirers, enthusiastic lovers of his work in France. Thanks to them, his thinking and his art were forever turned towards France.’39 On the occasion of the purchase of The Flight into Egypt by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, the press could present the painter as the ‘French artist par excellence’40 and the authors of the preface of the catalogue for the exhibition of the painting in 2008 refer to the ‘major artist that Nicolas Poussin represents’ who has ‘symbolized for artists and art critics alike the incarnation of French genius, made up of moderation and of daring’.41
Thuillier also wonders, however, in a more distanced way, about the perception of Poussin as a ‘French painter’.42 The question ‘Poussin, French painter or Roman painter?’ plunges us into confusion, explains the professor from the Collège de France. On the one hand there is the painter who ‘spent the forty most productive years of his life in Rome’, on the other ‘a painter in whom the Italians did not recognize themselves’. The books on French art history place Poussin under ‘French classicism’, while their Italian equivalents fail to even mention him. Poussin is claimed as a French painter during his lifetime, but particularly so a few years after his death. Thuillier explains that ‘in France in the seventeenth century there was the emergence of a genuine upsurge of nationalism, one of these deep-seated movements where the people join forces with intellectual milieus in the same shared passionate complicity’. In spite of everything, Italian pictorial art largely dominated at the time (‘in painting there was no escaping the pre-eminence of the land of Raphael and the Carracci’). As a result, ‘the fame Poussin had acquired in Italy came just at the right moment to persuade the French that a Frenchman could equal a Roman’. Félibien, in his Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres (1666–1688), wrote in his preface that Poussin ‘has been the honour and the glory of our nation, and can be said to have taken all the science of Painting as though from the arms of Greece and Italy to carry it back to France, where the fine arts seem to have found their home today’. Poussin is to Félibien what Michelangelo was to Vasari and ‘the “Poussin phenomenon” is used here, and deliberately, against Rome’. Poussin is therefore the painter needed by the French elite in search of a national artist-hero. French nationalism, in a context of Franco-Italian rivalry, is favourable to Poussin who fulfils a role which goes far beyond him.
Even when art history tends to somewhat broadly denigrate French painters, Poussin escapes the common fate. This is what Haskell observes through the useful example of a work by the French painter and art critic Charles-Paul Landon:
Between 1803 and 1817, the art critic Landon produced an extremely impressive series of volumes, the Vies et oeuvres des peintres les plus célèbres, recueil classique […], which was designed to provide a fully illustrated corpus of history painting on a scale never before attempted. The overwhelming majority of painters represented were Italians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; of the French, only Poussin, Le Sueur, Le Brun and Jouvenet were to be included. But although Poussin and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Le Sueur remained famous, French history painting as a whole lost its appeal.43
Poussin represents one of the rare exceptions which confirm the rule of the very frequent neglect of seventeenth-century French painters until at least the first third of the twentieth century:
The history of seventeenth century French painting has been held back for particular reasons, firstly because it only recently emerged after being almost completely forgotten. Apart from a handful of well-known and marginal figures such as the two Lorrains, La Tour and Claude Gellée or Poussin (the last two moreover making their careers in Rome), it was not until 1934 that this painting gradually began to re-emerge with the Le Nain exhibition and, even more importantly the exhibition entitled Peintres de la réalité en France au XVII siècle (The Painters of reality in France in the XVII century), organized by Charles Sterling.44
On the other hand, Poussin would be particularly honoured in the second half of the twentieth century, with renowned Poussinists holding prestigious positions in the major institutions: Thuillier, professor at the Collège de France from 1977; Rosenberg, director of the Louvre between 1994 and 2001, and elected to the Académie Française in 1995; Sir Anthony Blunt and Sir Denis Mahon, in England.45 Poussin’s appeal would even cross the Atlantic with North American museums buying the master’s canvases and the first large-scale exhibition devoted to him in 1988 in Fort Worth.46
Reading through a series of texts representing seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings on painting,47 the various processes of glorification, or of loss of prestige, in relation to Poussin can be traced. Amongst these, there are notably examples of advantageous associations or comparisons, which involve enhancing the reputation of an individual by association with the (already) ‘great’. Poussin is thus regularly positively compared to Raphael or to Titian (‘Poussin like X, or better than X’; ‘the X of France’). Comparisons can also be negative, in which case it might be said that ‘Poussin, unlike X, does not succeed in … or is not …’. He can also be placed, without there necessarily being question of an in-depth comparison, on the same level as other ‘great names’ (‘we should have had neither Corneille, Racine, Molière, Poussin, Le Brun, Le Moine, nor Pigal’48 or even ‘A Poussin painting succeeds in the miracle that we rarely find to the same degree except in Bach, to live on amidst the most subtle and serene architecture possible’49).
There is also a whole series of positive descriptions often directly linked to the great symbolic matrix which, half-politics, half-theology, orders all reality according to a vertical, hierarchized vision (high/low, superior/inferior, big/small, clever/dull-witted, noble/common, elevated/lowly, sublime/non-sublime, etc.):
There are also of course, though these are considerably less frequent, negative comments such as: ‘weak colourist’, ‘stilted’, ‘austere’, ‘severe’, ‘laborious’, ‘cold’, ‘tedious’, ‘a soul worn down by age and adversity, little liking for sensual delight, more of an antiquarian than an artist’,50 ‘the eye is not always satisfied by his paintings’, ‘his best works are extremely dry’, etc.
But the very fact that Poussin was evoked or cited, positively or, more rarely, negatively, by successive generations of writers, painters or scholars (Boileau, Fénelon, Voltaire, Diderot, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, Gautier, Gide, Proust, Aragon, Char, Claude Simon, Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet; David, Ingres, Delaroche, Delacroix, Millet, Armstead, Pissaro, Degas, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, Picasso, Lhote; Panofsky, Blunt, Lévi-Strauss, Mahon, Thuillier, Rosenberg, etc.), all of whom had themselves acquired legitimacy in their own sphere, contributes to keeping alive the memory of this painter and of his painting, even though the vast majority of others have fallen into oblivion and are practically unmentionable.
Poussin’s fame began to spread immediately after his death. His renown was particularly strong in France and in England but also in Germany, Holland, Italy and Spain. Even before his death, he was considered by some as the ‘French Raphael’ and the ‘most accomplished and the most perfect of all the moderns’ (Fréart de Chambray, 1662). Then Charles Le Brun, the first painter of Louis XIV, turned him into a pillar of the French classical tradition which developed within the Royal Academy of painting and sculpture between 1660 and 1670. ‘The academicians exhaust their analytical faculties over these resistant works, like theologians on a sacred text’,51 wrote Desjardins. Moreover, as well as the large number of engravings which would make the painter known throughout Europe, biographies and commentaries on his painting would also contribute to his fame.
Four biographies were written in the years after his death.52 To take just one example, Félibien speaks of Poussin as ‘an extraordinary man’ who possesses ‘genius’ (and a genius ‘greater than that of other painters’).53 He is a painter who knew ‘how to open the eyes’ of art lovers, ‘bring even greater knowledge [than Raphael or the Carraccis]’ and produce ‘extraordinary things’ (‘admirable art’, ‘in accordance with the spirit of the ancient Poets, Painters and Sculptors’). Employing the opposition between theory/practice, Félibien associates Poussin, of course, with theory, turning to the metaphor of elevation: ‘You may observe, I continue, that he says nothing of things regarding Practice and that he is interested only in Theory, or rather in that which depends on genius and the power of the mind; which we must particularly consider in the Poussin, who in that raised himself far above other Painters.’ Félibien compares Poussin to Raphael and to Titian (painters he could imitate to perfection but had never ‘slavishly copied’) and to ‘Poets’ (a key reference where art was concerned). He stresses the fact that Poussin only ‘became famous’ through his work and that it was useless to ‘seek in his ancestors any reasons to praise him’. What is more, Poussin is said to be indifferent to ‘fashion’ and to money (‘thinking less about earning money than about perfecting his work’54).
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Poussin’s glory grew, in spite of criticism and a relative disinterest in his work during the first part of the eighteenth century. The ‘quarrel of colours’, which arose in the Academy in 1671 on the occasion of a lecture by Philippe de Champaigne on the art of colour in Titian, was the first major attempt to play down Poussin’s talent.55 Champaigne, a friend of Poussin, opposed those supporting the importance of colour such as Gabriel Blanchard or Charles Le Brun. Certain writers argue that Titian, Giorgione, Van Dyke and especially Rubens were amongst the rare painters to have mastered the use of colour. Poussin, particularly in his later paintings, was judged to be weaker in terms of this art of colour. But the way in which his creative work was played down in no sense represented an overall questioning of his work. Poussin’s aura was too great for anyone to dare to attempt such a thing: ‘You are speaking there, Pamphile replied, of a man whose memory will always be revered by posterity. He mastered Drawing so perfectly, he approached his subjects in such a learned manner, finally he knew so many other aspects of Painting, that he can be forgiven if the efforts he took to seek perfection in Colours did not succeed.’56 If the critics are measured, they nevertheless caused Richelieu to give up his Poussin collection and to put together a new collection of paintings by Rubens.
Then, in the following years, between 1700 and 1715, the period of the rococo style and criticism of academicism nudged Poussin a little out of the limelight, though without ever totally eclipsing him.57 During this period, Poussin was seen by some as a dull painter. His imitation of antiquity and his attachment to the past were mocked, even if his supporters responded to these attempts at denigration by vaunting the appeal of landscapes and nature in much of the master’s work. The passing victory of Rubens and the arrival of new styles of painting account for the fact that the royal collections did not take in any new work by Poussin between 1693 and 1763 and that ‘many of his finest paintings left France, primarily for England, where almost half of his works were to be found by the end of the centruy’.58 Yet Poussin nevertheless became the ‘French painter’ par excellence during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, the person who – even when he is judged to be austere or dull – is deemed to incarnate the French spirit; one of the rare names, in any case, to be put forward as a serious competitor in the face of the crushing domination on the part of Italian painters.
The painter features amongst the ‘old masters’ studied, copied, admired and cited. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the revival of history painting in France restored Poussin to the centre of attention. His erudition, and particularly his knowledge of antiquity, were cited as the example of how things should be done in a period of a resurgence of interest in antiquity. In the 1780s, David (and neoclassicism) was explicitly inspired by Poussin and wanted to be the ‘most faithful representative of the art of Nicolas Poussin’ in the context of rivalry between other painters who claimed to take their inspiration from him.59 Seen, at this time, as the ‘saviour of French painting’,60 Poussin was the master in relation to whom others inevitably had to measure themselves if they wished to occupy the highest ranks.
Three names in particular won unanimous approval in the eighteenth century. Poussin, Le Sueur and Le Brun reigned supreme in Voltaire’s Temple of Taste (1733), completely overshadowing their fellow artists. Thanks to them France took on the mantle of Renaissance Italy and her fame spread throughout Europe. Guardians of the national genius, these three could hold their own with the other great masters: Raphael, Titian, Annibale, Carracci or Rubens. Lesser talents clustered around these great stars.61
In this period, Poussin’s paintings were bought by the English as much as by the French and also by the Germans and Russians too, to the extent that in 1815, only a dozen or so authentic paintings remained in Italy. The English were so fond of Poussin that monographs and catalogues raisonnés proliferated on that side of the Channel.
Poussin was also particularly cherished by the first French republicans who, at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, wanted to ensure the painter’s works were visible all over France: ‘the young French Republic around 1800 had instituted a policy by which a Poussin work, representative of the French nation, was sent out to each of the major provincial museums.’62 At the Louvre museum, an exhibition opening in August 1797 once again singled Poussin out from the population of seventeenth-century painters: ‘pride of place had been given to the great Italian masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, followed by the French (dominated by Poussin and Le Brun) and the “Flemish” (a denomination that included the German and the Dutch schools).’63 The Muséum de la Révolution et de l’Empire also reserved a place of honour for Poussin’s paintings, and in 1796 a medal bearing his effigy was produced as the award for the first prizes for painting and, in 1804, the first statue of the painter was created.
The nineteenth century therefore kept Poussin’s fame alive, notably by representing him as an independent artist dedicated to his work and to his work only. This reputation continued into the following century thanks to major exhibitions which paid tribute to this ‘painters’ painter’ as Véronique Damian points out:
The nineteenth century saw the birth of a veritable Poussin myth: his solitary character, his refusal of honours and his intensely personal style were all traits which seduced the era. For Balzac, he personified the complete artist; for Delacroix, he was ‘one of the most daring innovators’ and for Ingres and Cezanne, the obligatory reference. Gide and Malraux were fascinated by his ability to re-transcribe words or bas-reliefs in painting. Adored by England and by its art historians – Anthony Blunt and Denis Mahon – in France, he owed his ‘rediscovery’ to the major exhibition organized by the Louvre in 1960, to which André Chastel and Jacques Thuillier had made a significant contribution.64
After Cézanne, it would be Cubism, notably with Picasso, that would attribute importance to Poussin, considered as the painter who cared about the artistic coherence of the painting.
The interest which can be found either in Poussin’s painting or in his personality clearly varies depending on the era and the characteristics of those who seek to appropriate this work. Whether it is a taste for antiquity, for religious scenes, for historical painting or for landscape painting, an interest in the almost geometrical rigour of the composition, an admiration for the desire for independence from any powers, for the disinterestedness or the perfectionism of this born artist, there are so many reasons to love Poussin. Desjardins highlights the diversity that exists within this almost universal ardour: ‘What diversity, what contradictions in the motives for this universal admiration which Poussin never failed to attract! How each one praised him by seeing themselves reflected in him!’65 The author of a ‘critical biography’ of the painter indicates, moreover, that a shift in focus from painting to the artist was one of the reasons for his success: ‘We notice that if his prestige is permanent, it is because it has been renewed on two or three occasions. The people of the seventeenth century glorified his principles; the modern age appreciates his temperament.’66
The twentieth century is therefore the century which saw a proliferation of studies, both scholarly and popularizing, and major exhibitions of Poussin’s work. As early as 1914, three major publications were dedicated to him, one by Émile Magne, Nicolas Poussin, premier peintre du roi, 1594–1665, one by Walter Friedländer, German art historian, and another by Otto Grautoff, another German art historian, accompanied by a catalogue of the artist which was, for half a century, a major reference source on Poussin. In 1934, the famous exhibition entitled The painters of reality in France in the seventeenth century, organized in Paris at the Orangerie museum by Paul Jamot and Charles Sterling, represented a realist and anti-surrealist counter-offensive. It was a critical moment in France in terms of the re-evaluation of the pictorial art of the seventeenth century.
In a scene in In search of lost time, Proust shows how the theme of an austere and tedious Poussin, first in evidence at the beginning of the eighteenth century, still persisted to some extent at the time of the great impressionist revolution. Astute observer of the formation of taste, the writer thus reveals how Madame de Cambremer adjusts her opinion of Poussin according to her knowledge of the accepted tastes of the moment:
But the name of Poussin, without altering the amenity of the society lady, aroused the protests of the connoisseur. On hearing that name she produced six times in almost continuous succession that little smack of the tongue against the lips which serves to convey to a child who is misbehaving at once a reproach for having begun and a warning not to continue. ‘In heaven’s name, after a painter like Monet, who is quite simply a genius, don’t go and mention an old hack without a vestige of talent, like Poussin. I don’t mind telling you frankly that I find him the deadliest bore. I mean to say, you can’t really call that sort of thing painting. Monet, Degas, Manet, yes, there are painters if you like! It’s a curious thing’, she went on, fixing a searching and ecstatic gaze upon a vague point in space where she could see what was in her mind, ‘it’s a curious thing, I used at one time to prefer Manet. Nowadays I still admire Manet, of course, but I believe I like Monet even more. Ah, the cathedrals!’ […] ‘But’, I remarked to her, feeling that the only way to rehabilitate Poussin in her eyes was to inform her that he was once more in fashion, ‘M. Degas affirms that he knows nothing more beautiful than the Poussins at Chantilly.’
‘Really? I don’t know the ones at Chantilly’, said Mme de Cambremer, who had no wish to differ from Degas, ‘but I can speak about the ones in the Louvre, which are hideous.’
‘He admires them immensely too.’
‘I must look at them again. My memory of them is a bit hazy’, she replied after a moment’s silence, and as though the favourable opinion which she was certain to form of Poussin before very long would depend, not upon the information that I had just communicated to her, but upon the supplementary and this time definitive examination that she intended to make of the Poussins in the Louvre in order to be in a position to change her mind.
Contenting myself with what was a first step towards retraction, since, if she did not yet admire the Poussins, she was adjourning the matter for further consideration, in order not to keep her on the rack any longer I told her mother-in-law how much I had heard of the wonderful flowers at Féterne.67
After the Second World War, interest in the artist did not diminish. In 1958, Chastel, the French art historian, assisted by the young Thuillier, organized a symposium on Poussin at the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie de Paris, the proceedings of which were published in two volumes (Poussin et la posteriorité), just at the time when the first major exhibition on Poussin, organized by Charles Sterling and Anthony Blunt,68 was opening at the Louvre. These two events represent a peak in the resumption of interest in Poussin. In his preface to the exhibition,69 Bazin, who emphasized the unique nature of the event, (‘Never before has anyone attempted to bring together almost all the works of this artist’, p. 13), confronts the problem of the rather austere image most people at the time had of the painter. He refers to ‘the least popular of the great masters, at least in France’ (p. 13), of ‘the most harsh of masters’ (p. 36) and of a ‘difficult painter’ (p. 19), who painted ‘for men steeped in classical culture’ (p. 18). He describes him positively as a ‘thinking painter’ (p. 20), but writes that ‘one learns Poussin as one would learn Greek’ (p. 36) and notes the reproach often made towards the artist: his painting would be an ‘intellectual painting’ (p. 17). He is, according to him, ‘one of the greatest masters of French art’ (pp. 25–6) and he writes, nostalgically, about the preparations for the exhibition in question:
May I be allowed to recall the hours we spent, Sir Anthony Blunt, Charles Sterling and myself in the beautiful Adam building of the Courtauld Institute, constructing this monument to the glory of our god. […] Carried along by those beautiful forms and those elevated thoughts, our minds were transported back to the Great Century, and, beyond that, to that Antiquity which for the men of that time was not the past, but immortality.
English domination was at the time quite distinct in terms of scholarly knowledge on Poussin. Blunt and Mahon were extremely active and it was no coincidence that the Louvre should have entrusted part of the catalogue of the 1960 exhibition to the former.70 It would indeed require a rather overwhelming level of dominance for a foreign art historian to find himself awarded a prime role in a Parisian exhibition on a French painter.
In 1961, another exhibition was organized in Rouen by Pierre Rosenberg,71 followed in 1962 by the exhibition L’Ideale classic del Seicento in Italia e la pittura in paesaggio (Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio) which saw thirty-four paintings and twenty-one drawings by the painter brought together in Bologna. It was the first time, for two centuries, that so many works by Poussin had been seen on Italian territory. For his part, Blunt finished his critical catalogue of the paintings72 as well as a catalogue of the drawings. Then, over a period of twenty years between 1969 and 1988, there followed a series of publications: Kurt Badt in Germany (1969), Pierre Rosenberg and Nathalie Butor or Jacques Thuillier in France (1974), Doris Wild in Switzerland (1980), Christopher Wright in England (1985), and Konrad Oberhuber in Austria (1988).
A major exhibition was also organized in 1977–8 between Rome (Villa Medici) and Dusseldorf (Städtlische Kunsthalle), which involved three of the four greatest worldwide experts (Blunt, Thuillier, Rosenberg). During the 1980s, it was the turn of England, where the majority of the artist’s works were located, to organize various exhibitions. Finally, between September 1994 and January 1995, a major exhibition, entirely devoted to Poussin, was held at the Grand Palais. Rosenberg asserted that ‘Poussin is indeed the greatest French painter, and this is by no means simply the wild imaginings of an art historian’.73
For more than three centuries, many well-known writers and artists have written about Poussin or have mentioned him in positive terms, lending him their own legitimacy to make his glory endure. Amongst the (too many) writers we can mention: Fénelon (Dialogues of the dead and fables, texts composed for the education of the Duke of Burgundy, 1712), Voltaire (The Age of Louis XIV, 1751); A pocket philosophical dictionary, 1764, Diderot (Essay on painting, 1766), Paul-Émile Destouches (Épitre à Nicolas Poussin, par un jeune peintre, 1819), Stendhal (Histoire de la peinture en Italie, 1831), Balzac (The unknown masterpiece, 1831), René de Chateaubriand (Memories from beyond the tomb, 1849), Eugène Delacroix (Essai sur Poussin, 1853), Paul Desjardins (Poussin. Biographie critique, 1903), Marcel Proust (In search of lost time, 1908–22), Erwin Panofsky (from 1936), Anthony Blunt on Poussin and on seventeenth century painting (from 1937 to 1938), André Gide (Au divan, 1945; Autumn leaves, 1949), Denis Mahon (from 1947), Jacques Thuillier (from 1957), André Chastel (from 1959), Claude Lévi-Strauss (En regardant Poussin, 1993).
Poussin is also present in paintings and sculptures. For example, Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard (the son of the famous painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard) drew a Musée Napoléon ou les beaux arts (1813) depicting the Emperor welcoming Michelangelo, Rubens, Poussin, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci into the temple of art. Ingres, for his part, represents him in the foreground of his Apotheosis of Homer (1827), amongst a series of seventy-five great artists, philosophers and writers paying homage to the poet of poets (Corneille, Racine, Molière, Mozart, Shakespeare, Tasso, Apelles, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Ingres, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Van Dyke, Giorgione, Rembrandt, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc.), commissioned by the State for the decoration of a ceiling in the Musée Charles X in the Louvre (the portrait of Poussin which features in the work is directly copied from Poussin’s self-portrait). Paul Delaroche included him in The Hemicycle (1841), a mural painting in the École des Beaux-arts de Paris,74 Léon Benouville painted a Poussin on the banks of the Tiber in 1855, and Henry Hugh Armstead depicted Poussin (amongst 169 other artists and writers) in the Frieze of Parnassus on the Royal Albert Memorial, sculpted in 1864.
In the end, as Richard Verdi sums up,
Nicolas Poussin is one of the rare very great masters of the past whose fame has survived practically all revolutions in style and taste which have marked European art since the end of the seventeenth century. Whether rococo, neoclassical, romantic, realist and postimpressionist, all movements have found something to admire and to imitate in the many aspects of the personal contribution made by this painter. As the exhibition Copier Créer at the Louvre demonstrated, the same is true for many modern artists, who have often drawn their inspiration in the almost abstract formal components of Poussin’s art. And if impressionism, the most popular artistic tendency of all, seems less indebted to the founder of French classicism, it is nevertheless true that Degas copied and praised him, and that Pissarro himself saw in Poussin one of the spiritual ancestors of the ‘new painting’ of the 1870s.75
Without the construction, over a period of several centuries, of this privileged place in the history of art, it would be difficult to understand the obsession over the authenticity of canvases and their attribution to Poussin. In keeping with the principle of increasing rarity within a sacred universe, the name of the author to which these objects are attributed is what gives them their value, both economic and aesthetic, and what permits legitimate admiration and emotion. It is also what gives rise to all the desires to in some way appropriate the work, whether materially or symbolically.
Poussin, claimed as the French painter par excellence, even though he had spent most of his life in Rome; Poussin, appointed First Painter to King Louis XIII; Poussin, whose work is added to every public art collection with the dream of disseminating it, in the form of copies, to every provincial museum; Poussin, whose autograph works were to be classed as ‘national treasures’; Poussin, for whom a French municipality and the French State were prepared to pay an extremely high price in order to acquire a work rather than see it go to the United States; Poussin, creator of the painting which, acquired in this manner, can be admired on French soil: all of this, commonplace as it might seem to us today, is nevertheless an indication amongst others of the deeply rooted relationships between art and power.
At the same time as the artist was inventing himself historically, connecting those who write, paint, sculpt or compose to the summit of symbolic power – the ‘high’, the ‘elevated’, the ‘sublime’ or the ‘divine’ – in the same movement which made the artist a ‘creator’ equal to God or to the emperor (to king or prince), art became a sacred object that needed to be protected, preserved and withdrawn from ordinary commercial circulation when perceived as an element of the shared municipal or national patrimony. Whether they liked it or not, great artists became the pawns of a power which was greater than they were. Each level of power (familial, municipal, regional, national) would pride itself on the possession of their works or on their physical proximity during their lifetimes. Each level of power, and especially, in the final analysis, the Nation, seeks to turn artists to their advantage by diverting their capacity for seduction and attraction to their own ends.
Grand master of Museum collections, contributor to the Encyclopaedia, botanist and agronomist, André Thouin (1747–1824), in a letter, dated 6 Vendémiare de l’an six (27 September 1797) and addressed to François de Neufchâteau (1750–1828), writer, politician and agronomist, wrote: ‘All spectators must receive profound impressions which lead them to think, to put together different ideas and finally from their own reflections to draw great truths. By elevating their soul, they improve them and make them more firmly attached to their land, their laws, their government and their homeland’.76 Art is objectively put to the service of public power in order to increase the admiration of French citizens for their country, or to attract the attention of foreigners and to demonstrate – dictated by international rivalry – the great glory of France.
And powers communicate across time, for what has been the dominant art of a period is carefully conserved, made part of the national heritage and sometimes idealized, adulated and cited as an example by the dominators:
Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage [Abkunft: descent] which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another.77
The art historian Edouard Pommier pointed out that it was in Italy, in the second half of the fifteenth century (around 1470), that the first indications of a policy to protect the national heritage appeared. In his biography of Filippo Brunelleschi, Antonio di Tuccio Manetti already touches on the subject by referring to the status of ‘good things’ which should not be permitted to leave the country.78 The notion that some works of art cannot circulate freely and cannot be individually and privately owned, the idea that the public power (State, Church or municipal authorities) may intervene to control, limit or prevent the movement of works of art, began to emerge at the end of the fifteenth century in Italy:
Taking on the responsibility for the memory of Rome forced the pope to devise the elements of a new policy designed to preserve the physical presence of Antiquity. This initiative, the final link, in the Quattrocento, of a series of initiatives resulting from Boccacio’s discourses, is a decisive one the significance of which would only gradually be revealed. The initiative first takes a coherent form with the bull from Pius II, Cum almam nostrum Urbem, on 28 April 1462. This comprehensive and decisive document established the principle that the buildings of the ancients, which are testimonies to their virtu, must be handed down to posterity, and that it is therefore forbidden to destroy them, except on authorization from the pope, or to sell and export any work of art of antiquity. This unprecedented measure can be seen as the invention of a new law, a sort of jus soli, which creates, between a given territory, that of Rome, and the works of art that are to be found there, a bond of a public nature which can only be undone by the public power, in other words by the pontifical power. It is indeed a new law in that it applies to the individual’s rights to ownership, to the buildings or ‘things’ which belong to them. In the judicial structure of the ancient Romans, the right of ownership is a limitless right to use and abuse. The prohibitions decreed by Pious II are a constraint to the freedom of individuals. Yet they are so wide-ranging that they are victims of their own abstract generalization, which renders them inoperative, since there is no administrative structure capable of applying them.79
Almost ten years later, the same process is set in motion by Pope Sixtus IV, who forbade the free circulation of ancient marble statues owned by individuals.80
The testaments left by two noble families (that of Marcantonio Altieri on 22 October 1531 and that of Gabriele de Rossi, drawn up in May 1517) show that they
recognize therefore that the works of Antiquity can possess such symbolic importance that they belong outside the common law and are placed in a sort of legal sanctuary enabling them to be excluded from the free play of the market, considering them almost to be subject to mortmain and therefore regarding them as sacred in comparison with other elements of private property. With their antiques, the two families concerned exercise the same acknowledged and perpetual right as the Roman people, through the medium of their representative, the Curators, with regard to the antiquities which had been restored to them by Sixtus IV. The de Rossi and the Altieri had certainly read and correctly interpreted the text of 15 December 1471. They had read it so well that a second consequence was to result from their wills. It was the recognition of a de facto right of protection, attributed to the Curators (with their consent, or not?), thanks to which they are invested, with regards to these antiquities, with a protecting role which obliges them, in accordance with a sort of right of pre-emption before that even existed, to collect and to exhibit in their palaces works which would be taken out of a collection against the will of its founder.81
What we are witnessing here in this late fifteenth-century period is not the invention of the museum but rather, as Pommier so rightly says, that of ‘the first elements of what will later become the cultural heritage law making certain material objects, the categories of which will be extended indefinitely, into elements which constitute a public and perpetual heritage. For the community which has responsibility for it and manages it, this heritage is imbued with a value that is at the same time symbolic and rooted in identity’.82
On 28 November 1534, in a logical follow-up to the text of Sixtus IV, dated 15 December 1471, Pope Alexandre Farnese, known as Paul III, published a text of major significance:
The brief of 1534 is of major symbolic importance. It effectively establishes a sovereign law which overrides common law, in accordance with which the political power can intervene in the free play of private negotiations regarding certain moveable property, the ‘good things’ referred to in Brunelleschi’s biography, in the name of a sort of jus soli. This represents the beginnings of the history of legislation for matters of cultural heritage. The protection, begged for by Raphael, becomes an institution.83
The story we are now going to take up, one which ends with the public acquisition of a canvas attributed to Nicolas Poussin but long believed to be just a simple copy, is part of this long history of the appropriation of art by public powers.